Site Statistics

All our hosting accounts come with HTTP-Analyze preinstalled and configured.

HTTP-Analyze is a log analyzer for web servers. It analyzes the logfile
of a web server and creates a comprehensive summary report from the
information found there. http-analyze has been optimized to process
large logfiles as fast as possible.

In easier-to-understand terms, HTTP-Analyze is a very powerful traffic
analyzer that quickly and efficiently delivers you statistics on the
traffic that your web pages have generated. It has a user-friendly
graphical user interface (GUI) that by a click of your mouse button will
produce your traffic reports.

Below we explain in more detail how this powerful software works with
your web site, as well as provide you with definitions to the results
you'll receive.

The web server is a program running on a networked machine, waiting for
connections from the outside world to serve certain documents on behalf
of a request by a browser.

To communicate, the server and the browser use an asynchronous communication method called the HTTP
(hypertext transaction) protocol. It works as follows:

1. The user starts the browser and types in an URL
2. The browser connects to the given host and requests the specified document.
3. The web server handles the request and sends out a response:

a.if this document exists, the web server delivers it

b.if it does not exist or if access is not permitted, the web server sends back an error message instead.
4. The document delivered as an answer to this request may contain
inline objects. Inline objects are simply URLs pointing to another
resource, either a document, an image, an applet, a video/audio stream,
or any other addressable HTML object.
5. The browser then requests all inline objects of the current page
from the server using the steps 2 and 3 above, before it can display the
content of that page.

This communication method is called asynchronous, because the browser
sends out many requests for inline documents at once (without waiting
for a response from the server before sending the next request) using
different communication channels:

Since the browser's requests are often handled by different server
processes or different threads of a server process, there is absolutely
no relationship between the logfile entries caused by the responses from
the server due to a request of a document and it's inline objects. For
example, the order in which the server logs the successful transmission
of the document itself and the inline images contained therein is not
predictable and depends on the type of documents, objects, server speed,
system and network load, and many other parameters.

Q: What is logged?
A: Each and every response from the server - whether it indicates
success, an error, or even a timeout (i.e. no response) - gets logged in
the server's logfile. Since the server was hit by a request, such a
response is called a Hit. In other words, the total number of hits must
equal the total number of lines in the logfile minus the number of
corrupt and empty lines. A typical logfile entry in the Common Logfile
Format looks like:

The hostname field contains the full qualified domain name (FQDN) of the
site accessing your server. The next two fields usually contain a
minus (`-') to indicate that those fields are empty. The date is
surrounded by square brackets ('[' and ']'). The next field contains
the request. It contains the request method ('GET' for example), the
name of the requested document (URL), and the protocol specification
('HTTP/1.0').

The following field contains the servers response code ('200' stands for
an 'OK', while '404' would mean 'Document not found', for example). The
last field contains the size of the document (some servers log the
number of bytes transferred actually, while other servers log the size
of the document, which makes a difference if the user interrupts the
transfer before the document could be transmitted completely.

There are two other logfile formats, the Combined or Extended Logfile
Format. Those formats add the user-agent (browser type) and the referrer
URL (the page, which contains a link to the requested document if this
request for such document has been generated by following a link) to the
logfile entry. Those Combined or Extended Logfile Format append
following two fields to the Common Logfile Format (CLF) in one of two
usual ways:

Note that in the second form, the user-agent and the referrer URL are
surrounded by double quotes, which makes them ambiguous in certain cases
such as erroneous referrer URLs, which contain double quotes.
Therefore, the first form should be preferred if possible.

The entries shown above are the only information the server records in
the logfile. There might be much more information being transferred from
the browser to the server, but although this additional information is
available through CGI-scripts running on your server, it gets not logged
in the logfile. Therefore, http-analyze can only show you a summary of
the information in the logfile.

Definition of Terms

The statistics report contains among others the following information:

- The number of hits, 304's, files, pageviews, sessions, data sent (in KB)
- The amount of data requested, transferred, and saved by cache (in KB)
- The number of unique URLs, sites, and sessions per month
- The number of all response codes other than 200 (OK)
- The average hits per weekday and for last week
- The maximum/average hits per day and per hour
- The number of hits, files, 304's, sites, data sent by day
- The top 5 days, 24 hours, 5 minutes and 5 seconds of the summary period
- The top 30 most commonly accessed URLs (hits, 304's, data sent)
- The 10 least frequently accessed URLs (hits, 304's, data sent)
- The top 30 client domains accessing your server most often
- The top 30 browser types
- The top 30 referrer hosts
- The overview/detailed list of all files requested
- The overview/detailed list of all sites by domain and reverse domain
- The overview/detailed list of all browser types
- The overview/detailed list of all referrer URLs